Using Cloudflare to secure your cardholder data environment

As part of our ongoing compliance efforts Cloudflare’s PCI scope is periodically reviewed (including after any significant changes) to ensure all in-scope systems are operating in accordance with the PCI DSS. This review also allows us to periodically review each product we offer as a PCI validated service provider and identify where there might be opportunities to provide greater value to our customers.

Building trust in our products is one critical component that allows Cloudflare’s mission of “Helping to build a better Internet” to succeed. We reaffirm our dedication to building trust in our products by obtaining industry standard security compliance certifications and complying with regulations.

Cloudflare is a Level 1 Merchant, the highest level, and also provides services to organizations to help secure their cardholder data environment. Maintaining PCI DSS compliance is important for Cloudflare because (1) we must ensure that our transmission and processing of cardholder data is secure for our own customers, (2) that our customers know they can trust Cloudflare’s products to transmit cardholder data securely, and (3) that anyone who interacts with Cloudflare’s services know that their information is transmitted securely.

The PCI standard applies to any company or organization that accepts credit cards, debit cards, or even prepaid cards for payment. The purpose of this compliance standard is to help protect financial institutions and customers from having their payment card information compromised. Each major payment card brand has merchants sorted into different tiers based on the number of transactions made per year, and each tier requires varying requirements to satisfy their compliance obligations. Annually, Cloudflare undergoes an assessment by a Qualified Security Assessor. This assessor conducts a thorough review of Cloudflare’s technical environment and validates that Cloudflare’s controls related to securing the transmission, processing, and storage of cardholder data meet the requirements in the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Cloudflare has been PCI compliant since 2014 as both a merchant and as a service provider, but this year we have expanded our Service Provider scope to include more products that will help our customers become more secure and meet their own compliance obligations.

How can Cloudflare Help You?

In addition to our WAF, we are proud to announce that Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network, Cloudflare Access, and the Cloudflare Time Service are also certified under our latest Attestation of Compliance!

Our Attestation of Compliance is applicable for all Business and Enterprise accounts. This designation can be used to simplify your PCI audits and remove the pressure on you to manage these services or appliances locally.

If you use our WAF, enable the OWASP ruleset, and tune rules for your environment you will meet the need to protect web-facing applications and satisfy PCI requirement 6.6.

As detailed by several recent blog posts, Cloudflare Access is changing the game and your relationship with your corporate VPN. Many organizations rely on VPNs and other segmentation tools to reduce the scope of their cardholder data environment. Cloudflare Access provides another means of segmentation by using Cloudflare’s global network as a VPN service to access internal resources. Additionally, these sessions can be configured to time out after 15 minutes of inactivity to help customers meet requirement 8.1.8!

There are several large providers of time services that most organizations use. However, in 2019 Cloudflare announced our time.cloudflare.com NTP service. The benefits of using our time service rely on the use of our CDN and our global network to provide an advantage in latency and accuracy. Our 200 locations around the world all use anycast to route your packets to our closest server. All of our servers are synchronized with stratum 1 time service providers, and then offer NTP to the general public, similar to how other public NTP providers function. Accurate time services are critical to maintaining accurate audit logging and being able to respond to incidents. By changing your time source to time.cloudflare.com we can help you meet requirement 10.4.3.

Finally, Cloudflare has given our customers the opportunity to configure higher levels of TLS. Currently, you can enable up to TLS 1.3 within your Cloudflare Dash, which exceeds the requirement to use the latest versions of TLS 1.1 or higher referenced in requirement 4.1!

We use our own products to secure our cardholder data environment and hope that our customers will find these product additions as beneficial and easy to implement as we have.

Learn more about Compliance at Cloudflare

Cloudflare is committed to helping our customers earn their user’s trust by ensuring our products are secure. The Security team is committed to adhering to security compliance certifications and regulations that maintain the security, confidentiality, and availability of company and client information.

Great news for everyone using CloudFlare on an e-commerce site, or a site accepting or processing credit card transactions. After undergoing a Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) 2.0 security control assessment, we’ve been certified as a Level 1 service provider....